Match Game? A Darrin Rose by any other name is Jason Sudeikis

The first match that struck me on the new Canadian version of Match Game was how much host Darrin Rose looks like Saturday Night Live’s Jason Sudeikis. Check out the above photos, Rose followed by Sudeikis. I mean, seriously.

Moving past that, this 21st-century Match Game – which airs Monday-to-Friday on the Comedy Network, starting Monday, Oct. 15 – brought to mind a line I heard recently on the season premiere of the Fox/Citytv sitcom Raising Hope.

Sabrina (Shannon Woodward) was pointing out to her mom (Melanie Griffith) what a bad parent she was. Sabrina relayed the story of being left alone at age 12 for a weekend while mom flew to Las Vegas with her boyfriend.

That caused mom to bellow, “Hey, you don’t know Richard Dawson because he’s dead now, but he used to be a BIG DEAL.”

Dawson was, in fact, a big deal on the original version of Match Game in the early 1970s. Arguably, that was TV’s second golden age of game shows, the first having occurred in the 1950s.

The evidence all around us suggests we currently are not in a golden age of game shows. That means this new Match Game is different and exposed, which can be good or not so good.

Having seen an episode, I just hope that moving forward, everyone calms down a little bit. There are people here with great senses of humour, but you can’t force wacky.

Also, the panelists – the permanent ones being Debra DiGiovanni and Sean Cullen, with a rotating cast of four others per show – always should remember that you consistently have to try, really try, to come up with matches, rather than just going for laughs. The humour comes naturally when both contestants and panelists are giving it their best effort.

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Bill has been a Sun columnist, reporter and editor for 22 years. Previously was in Sports as Toronto Raptors beat writer and NBA columnist, he joined Entertainment in 2005 as a television and music critic before moving exclusively to TV. Prior to the Sun, he worked at the Montreal Daily News, the Orillia Packet & Times and the Sherbrooke Record.